As the wireless communication needs grow in the commercial and military sector, not only is it necessary for the devices to comply with the communication standards to prevent FCC regulation violations, but also to ensure reliability of data delivery to the customer, which can often times be hampered by hardware failure, lack of adequate data management, and signal interference. There is also a need to be able to make accurate measurements at the receiving and transmitting source that may be at a remote site without the ability to be at the site, thus requiring the need to have a long range instrument that can measure RF power, perform spectral analysis to find interference, and take corrective action toward that interference remotely. The ability to have long distance remote RF power reads, and spectral analysis, cannot however be accompanied with long delay in rise time or large system video bandwidth which then would make the measurement less reliable and in need of overhead for correction and compensation. Most commercial signals have video bandwidth that approaches 100 MHz and most peak power detectors can handle such signals, but there are signals that approach 200 MHz bandwidth such as multi-carrier wireless or high data rate satellite signals for which the peak power detectors are not a viable solution. In this case a swept frequency measurement could at least give an average power for the signal. Finally, in-depth analysis of signals requires the ability not just to know the amplitude in time but also modulation and spectral distribution in the frequency domain.
The market needs a device that can deliver wide measurement bandwidth, that can cover most if not all signal bandwidth, with a long distance remote measurement capability that does not introduce rise time delay through a physical link to the user, and can deliver raw unprocessed data with minimal system video bandwidth. The market also needs a system that is modular in platform and allows for construction of a unique system based on user choice for what kinds of modules can be put together in a system to achieve desired customer performance and functionality. Not to mention a networking capability that allows data management solutions on its own or as part of a greater network management solution, specifically for cellular networks.